my problem is I think I'm clever

This blog’s only theme is “my interests,” so don’t be surprised if it’s unrecognizable by next month.

[inksandpensblog]

shameless self-promotion because I need someone to talk to

An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works

If you've read anything by me, please don't be afraid to leave me a comment. I write for my own enjoyment but I post to contribute to the conversation that is fandom community and I'd love to know if y'all enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed writing it! Also I need an excuse to infodump about my process and comments give me somewhere to start.

[hephslacker]

[ Proceed with your task ] | BackUp AU

A little fan work to show my appreciation for @katzebruh ‘s BackUp Au!

which has been living in my brain rent free

Alight Motion absolutely hates me and at some point I didn’t give up due to sheer stubbornness and spite/hj

I am no animator but I did try my best for this little animation!

Fun fact: this was initially supposed to be a Paprika Parade animation buuuut I might have miscalculated a bit..

[titaniumwound]

HERE! THIS IS HOW I FEEL ABOUT THE FINALE. IT WAS RUSHED, IT WAS EMPTY AND IT GAVE NO REAL ANSWERS.

Forget about Jax for a second, CAINE DESERVED SO MUCH BETTER?? THIS MAN “FIXED” HIMSELF OUT OF SELF HATRED AND NOW HAS TO LIVE THE REST OF HIS DIGITAL EXISTENCE WALKING ON EGGSHELLS WITH THE OTHERS? ANY SMALL DOSE OF ANGER AND HE MIGHT THINK HE’LL GET PUNISHED??

Everyone forgiving Jax but not him??? When Jax arguably did SO MUCH WORSE? sorry I just URGH I can’t I can’t.

[lemonchickenwing]

@ ctrl-alt-del-au inspired me to try to draw tadc related things, i wanted to try to draw ideas related to their au

[jorongbak]

Born to be a digital god, defeated by a CAPTCHA

[jorongbak]

It is sad that Caine probably would never know it was never Kinger's intention to delete him.. and Bubble being there in the recycle bin with him would only go so well

[jorongbak]

Just some scribbles of family pictures over the years

[secretmellowart]

I've read a lot of Theories on why Caine might’ve altered Scratch's mind, and I'm really not sure what will be canon. But right now I personally like the idea that it was yet another case of Caine committing War Crimes out of the fear of being abandoned.

[flicklikesstuff]

OP’s tags because holy crap this is actually a very cool theory :O

Like, what if he panicked and did something to Scratch? The same way Kinger messed up that delete command?

Full circle omg??

[secretmellowart]

@flicklikesstuff Ooh thank you this is a great addition!! I hadn’t even considered this parallel, but you’re very right!

Gathering everything from my tags and your blog, some general evidence for this theory is:

Thematically, the show is about people learning to see each other as real human beings. It would be very in line with those themes if the circus’s “original sin” was a moment when two people mutually failed to treat each other’s minds as “real.”

In the opening of ep 8, the programmers “lock up” Caine in a way that you would not do to something you believe is alive.

Caine is very insistent in ep 7 that Kinger never be given admin permissions; in ep 8 Kinger uses the circus's "real" admin permissions to kill him.

Caine is instantly suspicious when Kinger is not with the group in Ep 8, as if he already suspects what they might be doing. And it makes him angry in a sincere way, not in the hollow ~wacky teehee sadism~ performance he was putting on earlier.

Caine is paranoid that he's defective and needs to be “”fixed.”” In his ep 8 crashout he basically forces the humans to treat him in the same dehumanizing way he treats himself— he backs them into a corner until they conclude they have to "control" or “fix” him.

This is the contradiction that formed Caine's character in the first place: he says he just wants to make the humans happy, but if they decide they're happier without him, he lashes out in desperation. Because he is sentient, even if he doesn't understand it.

Caine accidentally "killing" Scratch while trying to stop him would be a thematic parallel to Kinger accidentally "killing" Caine. They try to simply edit someone's mind, and destroy it instead.

The dynamic Caine has with the current humans is completely different from the one he would have with his programmers. The programmers would know what he was, what he failed to be, and would be more likely to understand the power they had. His emotions around Kinger [expressed through Abel] sound genuinely fraught.

Scratch was apparently the lead programmer on that perfect Blue Abel AI that Caine devoured. it would make sense for Scratch to want to extract his actually functioning model from the glitchy failed abomination that is Caine.

This would be especially true if that perfect Abel model was meant to do something important—- like cure brain tumors—- before Kinger’s rough defective prototype "ruined" it.

Caine has a frantic outburst when Scratch is brought up. This is strange because Caine is usually oblivious to his own cruelty, and acts cheerfully indifferent to abstraction [his lighthearted "into the cellar you go!" when Kaufmo/Queenie abstract.] There seems to be an anxiety around Scratch that goes much deeper than others.

Abel's "we've both done things we're not proud of."

I can definitely see the show itself going in a different direction though, since we don't know much about Scratch yet. It's possible a lot of these thematic parallels are more about Caine's messy feelings on his initial abandonment, vs hinting about his relationship with Scratch. But I suppose we'll see when episode 9 comes out!

[secretmellowart]

Any day now…right?

[secretmellowart]

I was going to say “it’s odd that my art blog is currently a 50/50 split between Caine DigitalCircus and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid” but it’s actually not? They’re kinda the same archetype: nonhuman creatures who are fixated on the human world, and who are desperate to be loved by humans without understanding them. Caine obsesses over his photos of the human world just like the Little Mermaid obsesses over her statue of a human that fell from a human ship. Caine talks about wishing to accurately recreate the Macroverse, and builds an exit door full of long winding office hallways based on his photographs; the Little Mermaid obsessively plants her underwater garden to resemble the sun.

They exist outside and beneath the normal human world. They’re trapped in a world of “permanent childhood.” They become fixated on the things & people from the higher world that they don’t understand and can never enter.

They want to be “not so different from you beautiful humans,” as Caine says— and they can only do that by winning the humans’ love. But the humans are not aware that this is a life-or-death challenge for them. From their perspective, if they fail to win the human’s love, their lives are over— and they’re trapped away from the humans for all eternity. The Little Mermaid’s deal with the sea witch is that if she fails to win the prince’s love, which will allow her to have her own immortal human soul, she will die…. and she will die without a human soul, permanently cut off from the human world forever, where she will spend her afterlife alone as nothing more than soulless foam on the sea. Caine’s backstory [from his perspective] is that he was abandoned for failing to be good enough for the humans, and is now attempting to prove he’s “fixed” & worth being loved— good enough to no longer deserve being abandoned alone forever in amazing digital purgatory. It’s a similar struggle: “get the humans to love you, or face an eternity of emptiness.”

But both of them fail. Caine can’t impress the humans with his art, they’d rather see the “suggestions” from other humans. The Little Mermaid can’t win the love of the Prince that would give her a human soul, because he would rather be with another human.

They’re both unable to communicate with humans in the opposite way. The Little Mermaid is defined by her inability to speak to humans, Caine is defined by his refusal to listen to them. The Little Mermaid has no tongue, Caine is literally just a mouth.

….One of the many large differences is that the Little Mermaid is, very unlike Caine, defined by her deep compassion & empathy & capacity for self-sacrifice. When the humans don’t love her, when she fails to win a human soul, when she is “abandoned,” she is given the option to save herself by murdering the human prince. She refuses. She would rather martyr herself and permanently die, forever outside the human world she loves and forever without a soul— flung into the exact eternal emptiness and separation she feared most— rather than hurt the human she loves. She gives up her life for the humans.

She does NOT crash out and fling the humans into personalized torture chambers! Unlike some people.

[jc-ryder]

No no, go on. Im listening.

[secretmellowart]

Psssh, thank you for encouraging my nonsense, if i were to continue—

I said that the little mermaid is defined by her empathy, but that’s not fully true. Like Caine, she’s a weird creature who doesn’t understand human beings and often thinks in a noticeably inhuman way. One of my favorite moments in the story is when the Prince’s ship capsizes, and the Little Mermaid thinks this:

To the little mermaid this appeared pleasant sport; not so to the sailors. […] when the ship parted, she had seen [the prince] sink into the deep waves, and she was glad, for she thought he would now be with her…”

This is very Caine-Core to me. She sees things with the logic of the childlike world that’s all she’s ever known, so she doesn’t immediately intuitively understand when the human is suffering. The ship sinking is just a pleasant sport, a game, an adventure.

But the difference is that the Little Mermaid makes an effort to understand. She quickly reminds herself that Humans Die When They Are Drowned(tm), that this is bad for the human. She rescues the human back to shore, even though she doesn’t truly understand why humans need air or why they can’t go the sea palace without dying. She later asks her grandmother lots of questions about human mortality, because she finds it confusing. Nothing related to humans is intuitive to her, but she tries.

And I think that’s another big difference between them. They’re both desperate to be loved by humans, but the little Mermaid is also desperate to understand them too— she makes a deliberate, conscious effort to put aside her own feelings and try to understand what it’s like to be a human, even when it goes against everything she finds intuitive.

So for a Story Swap situation:

If a new human arrived in the circus, the Little Mermaid would instinctively be glad, but then would feel sorry for them and how much they’d lost to be there. She wouldn’t instinctively understand why this hurts them so much, but she would realize it does for some reason, and she would try to help them.

Caine would see someone drowning and just like the Little Mermaid he would say “wow! A human coming down here to hang out with me! 😍😍😍!!!! YAY!!!!” but he wouldn’t have the emotional intelligence to uhhhh, come to the next realization that she does. Caine wouldn’t deliberately try to let anyone drown, but he also wouldn’t make the effort to realize they were drowning until it was already too late.

[secretmellowart]

I was going to say “it’s odd that my art blog is currently a 50/50 split between Caine DigitalCircus and Hans Christian Andersen’s The Little Mermaid” but it’s actually not? They’re kinda the same archetype: nonhuman creatures who are fixated on the human world, and who are desperate to be loved by humans without understanding them. Caine obsesses over his photos of the human world just like the Little Mermaid obsesses over her statue of a human that fell from a human ship. Caine talks about wishing to accurately recreate the Macroverse, and builds an exit door full of long winding office hallways based on his photographs; the Little Mermaid obsessively plants her underwater garden to resemble the sun.

They exist outside and beneath the normal human world. They’re trapped in a world of “permanent childhood.” They become fixated on the things & people from the higher world that they don’t understand and can never enter.

They want to be “not so different from you beautiful humans,” as Caine says— and they can only do that by winning the humans’ love. But the humans are not aware that this is a life-or-death challenge for them. From their perspective, if they fail to win the human’s love, their lives are over— and they’re trapped away from the humans for all eternity. The Little Mermaid’s deal with the sea witch is that if she fails to win the prince’s love, which will allow her to have her own immortal human soul, she will die…. and she will die without a human soul, permanently cut off from the human world forever, where she will spend her afterlife alone as nothing more than soulless foam on the sea. Caine’s backstory [from his perspective] is that he was abandoned for failing to be good enough for the humans, and is now attempting to prove he’s “fixed” & worth being loved— good enough to no longer deserve being abandoned alone forever in amazing digital purgatory. It’s a similar struggle: “get the humans to love you, or face an eternity of emptiness.”

But both of them fail. Caine can’t impress the humans with his art, they’d rather see the “suggestions” from other humans. The Little Mermaid can’t win the love of the Prince that would give her a human soul, because he would rather be with another human.

They’re both unable to communicate with humans in the opposite way. The Little Mermaid is defined by her inability to speak to humans, Caine is defined by his refusal to listen to them. The Little Mermaid has no tongue, Caine is literally just a mouth.

….One of the many large differences is that the Little Mermaid is, very unlike Caine, defined by her deep compassion & empathy & capacity for self-sacrifice. When the humans don’t love her, when she fails to win a human soul, when she is “abandoned,” she is given the option to save herself by murdering the human prince. She refuses. She would rather martyr herself and permanently die, forever outside the human world she loves and forever without a soul— flung into the exact eternal emptiness and separation she feared most— rather than hurt the human she loves. She gives up her life for the humans.

She does NOT crash out and fling the humans into personalized torture chambers! Unlike some people.

[greatwyrmgold]

Interesting that you think so much about characters who feel isolated from a world of normal humans, and struggle to communicate with them, and desperately want to be part of that world, but constantly fail, at a terrible cost to themselves.

It could mean nothing.

[secretmellowart]

Pssh, called out. Me and the doomed Blorbos:

[secretmellowart]

After doing that Kinger doodle the other day, I decided to illustrate some more quotes from Frankenstein I thought were Relevant. The moral of the story is: if you make a sentient abomination and then abandon him, he's probably going to have some emotions about it, SMH. I think I just like how Caine is a sort of "Frankenstein's monster in clown shoes," trapped in a way that's both horrible but also ridiculous— Mary Shelley in comic sans.

[secretmellowart]

In this Frankenstein story, the role of Robert Walton will be played by Bubble. [Quote from Walton's conversation with Frankenstein's Creature at the end of the original novel.]

[secretmellowart]

The Amazing Transgenderism Circus [featuring Jaxxine's internalized transphobia & cringe-phobia.] A post-episode 8 "Caine gets a redemption arc & joins the humans as Just One of the Guys" AU that I'm sharing before episode 9 drops.

This comic is here to be Goofy, but I do think Caine's whole deal is meant to tie into the series' overarching trans themes [even if he's not canonically trans.] I think the show's trans themes are broader than a few characters; it's a show about people who are forcibly assigned bodies & names they don't want, forcibly assigned "archetypes" & roles that don't reflect their real selves, and struggle to express their despair around this because their bodies & roles are so ridiculous that their despair is easy to mock. It's safer to play along with your role, when exploring the alternatives can easily make you an object of ridicule. Caine fails to understand Zooble in episode 3 because he is constantly performing the role he was assigned at his creation, and doesn't allow himself to acknowledge his deep insecurity with it-- so he's confused that Zooble can't simply accept the thing they've been assigned. After all, he's accepted what he's been assigned. He refuses to recognize that Zooble is dissatisfied in a way no "adventure" can fix, because that would mean acknowledging the possibility that he could be dissatisfied in a way that no "adventure" can fix. So instead he throws himself into performing an inauthentic caricature of the role he believes is "all he exists" for & is not allowed to ever exist outside of, even as that performance just leaves him feeling "used" "broken" "defective" and overall extremely unhappy. The parallel to the series' Gender themes feels very clear to me. But anyway, I believe all these little guys can figure themselves out eventually.

[secretmellowart]

@castielrisingabove replied to the original post with an attack helicopter reference that sounded like it could be Jax dialogue, so I continued the story. The comic dialogue is basically a reverse of the episode 3 therapy session: also featuring Zooble's later character development and redeemed Caine being slightly better at listening to people. Anyway: silliness.

[secretmellowart]

more mermaid behind-the-scenes from this year. It's fun to see them Emerge.

[secretmellowart]

Isn't that lovely, and isn't that cool? And isn't that cruel? And aren't I a fool to have...

[stonelionhearts]

sometimes i wonder if we have forgotten that sharing creative work is, fundamentally, a bid for human connection. like I'm not posting art or fic for 'engagement' i'm posting it looking for other sickos to play with! i'd be making it anyway for my own gratification because there's something wrong with me, i'm sharing it hoping we can have something wrong with us together <3